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Where I Was From: The O.C., 10 Years Later

On the tenth anniversary of the most important show of the last decade—yes, it's true—one CA native looks back on the show's impact on the television landscape and Southern California itself...

Ten years ago this week, Fox premiered a teen drama set in Newport Beach, California—a wealthier, more singular and swaddled fret of coastline than the proximate (to LAX, to Hollywood) Los Angeles County towns where the show was really shot. I grew up in those towns: Manhattan Beach (soundstages), Redondo Beach (on-location exteriors), Palos Verdes (The Model Home, etc.). I was 16 when Seth and Ryan and Marissa and Summer were 16 (at least the first time they were 16), and I conflate high school memories with scenes from season one_._ Later, in college, I gave tours of shooting locations to out-of-town friends and to girls I suspected might like seeing The Bait Shop, or the chapel where Julie and Caleb got hitched, or the public high school to which Marissa was relegated at the start of season three—my high school. Though these spots were not technically Newport, they all meant to suggest the same thing on the show: that there were, in fact, people living in nice parts of Southern California that were not Hollywood, not the Valley, not 90210 or Melrose Place. That these places were even weirder, maybe more essentially Californian, than those familiar ones and possibly more into themselves—full-headed with a beach-blond teenager’s self-regard. They were places with crisp, unblemished ego. Southern California without the shadows of L.A. noir or the wear of the movie industry. Southern California with fresher paint, better light.

More O.C.:

First thing I heard about the show was from my best friend, who, as a rising senior in our high school’s "video" program, had scored an internship at the local studio. "This show I’m working on," he said one afternoon at Chili’s, where I worked, "has got some babes." After filming a bundle of seven episodes, those babes—Mischa Barton (Marissa) and Rachel Bilson (Summer)—spent an afternoon handing out promo materials at the Hermosa Beach Pier Plaza. Same with the young male leads—Benjamin McKenzie (Ryan), Adam Brody (Seth), Chris Carmack (Luke)—each of whom were competitively unknown. Even series creator Josh Schwartz, an East Coast transplant and USC film grad who at 26 had become one of the youngest-ever ecutive producers of a network show, took part in the low-yield outreach. The show seemed fun but pretty small. We knew something of what was coming—that beach-city-dwelling teenagers from Santa Barbara to San Diego were to have a mirror held up Tuesdays at 9—but did anyone else, anywhere else, care?

I watched the premiere alone on vacation in the mountains, a long way from the beach and the ecstatic viewing parties that would come later. As a refresher: Ryan Atwood is caught abetting brother Trey with a carjacking. Trey goes to jail, but Ryan is brought home to Newport by his surfing super-lawyer, Sandy Cohen. Sandy’s wife, Kirsten, isn’t into it, but squirrely-loner-son Seth finds in Ryan an unlikely companion. After a night in the pool house, and some sparked-up exchanges with Cohen neighbor Marissa, we move from this fund-raiser fashion show to a party down on the beach. Before Ryan gets in his first fight (he’d get in twenty-two, all told) and before Luke says, "Welcome to the O.C., bitch!" (line of lines, the show’s instantly adopted tag), we’re given something even better. Ryan sponges up the party and its flamingo-necked cocktails and its slinky beach bunnies in shorts and bikini tops. And then he does this wordless eyebrow thing he’d do a thousand times over the course of the series’ four seasons, somewhere between "Are you kidding me?" and "I look like CINDERELLA MAN." He turns to Marissa, archly assessing the room—Ryan was increasingly less cool every episode following the pilot—and says: "I think I could get in less trouble where I’m from."

"Where I’m From" was Chino, which was metonymic shorthand for Worst Place Ever. Chino is a real city—east of Newport, sixty miles from the beach, totally fine—that was made to look like a prison yard of 36,000. Real Chino wasn’t stoked; city officials chipped back for the portrayal as a "dirtbag town." But "Chino" served as counterweight to the equally cartoonish "Newport"—which upon reviewing, is a more toxic place than I remember it ten years ago. Brutishly classist. Fantastically solipsistic. Not much interest in life beyond the bubble. The show has a moral compass, but its needle spins carefree, which is really for the better. Newport was the show’s best character—the best looking, the most fun, the one with all the lures and traps. She was real in all the important ways and unreal in the ways that made good television.

_The O.C.’s _Newport predicted the coming of a gross shift to those places I grew up in—an influx of supreme wealth and entitlement that has displaced many of the dead or old (middleish-class) people who moved there in the ’50s and ’60s. (It’s basically the same turn that’s happened in Atlantic Coast places like Montauk: A low-glam beach town consumed wholly, maybe inevitably, by the ethos of Caleb Nichol, Julie Cooper, and The Hamptons Thing [a.k.a. Newport East Thing.]) Today the cities in the South Bay resemble The O.C.’s "Newport" more than ever. But in 2003, there was still something reasonable about the South Bay and even sort of likable about the "Newport" on TV—a fake place that could pantomime the look and feel of life in a Southern California coastal town.

Viewers probably hadn’t seen that part of California in pop culture since the summer episodes of Saved by the Bell, or maybe even Point Break. The O.C. was this keyhole, in a door no one had much wondered about, behind which millions of viewers gathered weekly to peer through squint-eyed. Are the water-polo players really campus kings?Are there truly no covered hallways in the high schools?Surf racks fit atop lifted trucks? Even the nerds skateboard?! This was an awesome thing. A prime-time Fox melodrama made veracious and immoderately watchable by little details like those plain-sight secrets that we who had never lived elsewhere took for granted. This was fun for us. Even more fun it seems, looking back, for those living elsewhere—that you’d tasted that stuff and liked it.

Five episodes had already aired by the time my senior year of high school started. As far as my friends and I were concerned, we were the only ones watching. We knew Ryans, but we were mostly Seths. We’d been neighbors with Marissas since elementary school—but not much more. For the last couple years of high school, we’d had our eyes on Summers (and mostly dated Annas), but this was a new year, the last year. I’d been dumped at the beginning of the summer—blubbered around for a couple months, tried to bump into her accidentally at the ice cream shop where she scooped (in, yep, a bikini top)—and hadn’t really come close to digging myself out by August. Then, though: first look at Marissa and Summer—who to my 16-year-old mind represented the spectrum of female possibility. (That is, one was a tall blonde with Eastern-Bloc bones that popped at her cheeks and collar, the other a short brunette whose hands were never not on her hips.) All at once I was doing okay. That’s where it started, I guess.

Holy shit, that first season! My friends and I got together to watch in small groups. But elsewhere, it turned out, you gathered en masse. Look back in your yearbooks, full pages devoted to student-submitted photos of _O.C. _viewing parties. This was different from watching Friends, or whatever else was on in 2003. And also different from watching Grey’s Anatomy or _Mad Men _or Breaking Bad later, which came to be occasion for their own get-togethers, and now basically seem better on a bender—House of Cards model. But with The O.C., there was still only one way. This was feverishly-tended-to appointment television in the golden moment before Hulu and Netflix streaming.

For two and a half seasons, people paid attention. And those young actors and actresses became big-time in a way that foreshadowed the emblematic, tabloidy web worship that would cling to every semi-successful teen show to come. Where the character/actor lines blur in the news; where the writers of the show embrace those blurred lines. Midway through the third season things turned hard. The kids had to start thinking about college, leaving, blowing the storytelling convenience of a high school situation. Many of the roles—even first-season principles like Luke—were rewritten so many times that they all sort of swapped places or grew to resemble one another; basically, every character became Seth. Talking solely in ironic cultural references, acting at all times gooberishly charming, full-out hate-loving Newport. _The O.C. _seemed not at all interested in keeping the train on the tracks but instead devoted itself to creating, in its derailment, the most spectacular-looking fireball. And yet even as the show stumbled into self-parody, there appeared a suggestion that a long tail of legacy might roll out. New shows were cropping up, playing off The O.C.’s popularity. Which in many ways was the new popularity of the place. Some of those shows had direct ties, and others seemed to have emerged from nowhere in particular. But to see the qualities _The O.C. _sparked as a cornerstone for several different strands of mass-influence television this past decade, go on and trace the lines:

Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County—the first heavily scripted reality show of its sort. Shot with high-def digital cameras in order to look filmic. Buttery tubes and rock outcroppings conducive to heavy conversations and Stephen and LC.

From Laguna Beach to _The Hills, _Lauren Conrad’s spin-off to Hollywood. Where we were gifted Heidi and Spencer.

And, as piggy-back-bonus, Spencer’s old friend from Malibu, Brody Jenner. Who as it turned out was the son of Bruce Jenner, step-father to the Kardashian Three—who will, in this model, typify that swirl of accelerating disorder Jeff Goldblum demonstrates with that water-on-the-hand thing in Jurassic Park, the shitstorm predicted by "chaos theory." That is: The O.C. wrought all that.

And even more directly, this: When an end was in sight, Josh Schwartz pitched The O.C., but in New York. Wow wow wow, the months leading in to Gossip Girl. Fans were not just restless for a follow-up to _The O.C., _but primed by a best-selling series of young-adult books, too. It was in all ways the opposite of the silent start of The O.C.—except for the fact that the characters and cast were one-to-one O.C. analogs, down to hair color and social status.

The shows that tailed Gossip Girl were familiar types, too: a reality tie-in (NYC Prep); a post-high-school, how-to-make-it-in-the-fashion-industry-without-a-college-degree _Hills _spin-off (The City); and a half-baked E! thing where the Kardashians closed the circuit—bending, as basic life forms do, back toward the light—with their arrival to New York. I think I could get in less trouble where I’m from. It was the chorus of a generation of TV viewers hooked on the premise: Look at these cracked-out sort-of-rich people!

Further: Chart the influence of the indie-music thing from The O.C. How it became a supreme destination for new bands, a standard of taste to be marketed and sold the morning after an episode aired. Evidence that a show could break musicians into the mainstream.

Or how about the style of intra-referential, hyper-self-conscious writing—making jokes about itself before anyone else could; alluding to real-life, actor-not-character events beyond the confines of the show? The sort of writing we came to see in _Community, _and _30 Rock, _and _Glee. _It’s not like Dan Harmon and Tina Fey were waiting for Josh Schwartz to show them it was possible to make that kind of scripted TV, but it was, for many fans, the first place we fell for the effect. (Remember The Valley? The show-within-a-show on _The O.C. _that had Ryan and Seth and Marissa and Summer parroting all the things fans of _The O.C. _were saying about them? That was pretty gnarly.)

And finally: _The Real Housewives of Orange County. _Without _The O.C. _there is no Vicky Gunvalson. Without Vicky Gunvalson, Bravo and Andy Cohen are not in our homes every night. And without Andy Cohen in our homes every night...

Before we leave it behind, let’s drop back to the first breakdown of The _Gossip Girl _Effect. A 2008 New York magazine cover sold the story as: "What Gossip Girl gets right about New York." It was a way of assessing the show that would become plenty familiar to readers of New York’s longstanding GG recaps. (The essay’s authors designed the recaps as a scoreboard of verisimilitude—a reality index.) It’s no coincidence that that’s also the metric that argues most affirmatively for the legacy of The O.C. No matter how hyperreal the show’s caricatures and frosted sunlight (it is a place, as people who have visited know, of hyperreal caricatures and frosted sunlight), the relevance and the rightness were in the details.

Things like: That every adult works in real estate. That dads dress like 12-year-old grommets. That Hollywood is pretty close but also impossibly distant. That volleyball players do better for themselves than football and basketball stars. That Tijuana is the first place 16-year-olds come up with for a road trip. That rich blonde girls find something in L.A. punk rock that just really speaks to them. That most of the adults weren’t born there; that most of the kids are first-generation homegrown. That California exceptionalism burns most brightly not with a high school senior in Iowa, but among the California kids living it every day. (Just listen to the lyrics of the surf-rock thing going on right now—or bands like Rooney and The Thrills, both of whom performed on the show.) That teenagers cannot fathom life in another state—as in Marissa, S1E2: "[He’s living] in Texas?" That bonfires exist. That magazines like Newport Living exist. That water polo is the sine qua non of the whole condition.

Fox aired a season two prime-time special, The O.C.: Obsess Completely (!), my third week of college on the East Coast. (This was a school, I just learned, credited for teaching the first course on The O.C.) I was one of just a few from my area, disoriented like someone from Chino at a Newport party, amongst the polos and Frisbees and O.A.R. of everywhere-but-CA 18-year-olds. (Welcome to That Part Between the Mid-Atlantic and the South, bitch!) The things I liked about home felt far away, and a lack of fluency in summer camps and prep schools and New Jersey left me feeling more alone than I probably ever have, before or since. But there, in the common room, they’d gathered. These girls—mostly girls—from sacred-sounding places, with probably really old rocks, called Bedford and Brookline and Bethesda, Wiki-ing off plot details, reminding each other what had happened in that season finale long ago. I sat, half-committed, on the arm of a sofa, and watched as the special—Adam and Ben and Mischa and Rachel edited into overnight objects of delirium—played out, and my dormmates leaned into the glow, mainlining Califoooornniaaa as if it were something critical and sustaining_. _I guess I was looking for someone who spoke my language. Which, as it turns out, was less about tracking down new friends from Southern California than finding a handful of people who just really dug the show. They said their names and asked me where I was from, and I think I pointed, like a dipshit, to the TV. Still, somebody was impressed. I told her I’d give her a tour of the spots if she ever came out. In my memory, it was received as a really good idea—a trip to this place that was easy to idolize, and even to miss. The whole world, it seemed, had been made to understand.